Wednesday, October 21, 2009

My Writing Soundtrack

I'm interested in how other people write, what kind of conditions are needed to bring a story to life from an initial image or opening line or character they've thought of. I like to write in public spaces but often find myself writing at home, listening to Josh Rouse. Seems like most of my writing time has been scored by Josh Rouse since I first discovered him when I was a freshman in college (99/00). Lately, though, I've been listening to Lewis & Clarke when I write, a band my friend Artist/Musician Caleb Engstrom introduced me to at a very intimate show here in Iowa City. I am most drawn to the atmosphere they create with their music and the folksy lyrics, which lend themselves to the sense of place I try to create in my fiction. Though I've found few videos of Lewis & Clarke on the net, here is a clip of them performing "Before It Breaks You," a personal favorite; this video should give you an idea of what I am talking about. Enjoy.

2020

About me

Blake Kimzey founded and directs Writing Workshops Dallas & Writing Workshops Paris. Named one of D Magazine'sArtists to Learn From, he is a graduate of the MFA Program at UC Irvine; Blake also sits on the Board of the Elizabeth George Foundation and received a generous Emerging Writer Grant from the Foundation. His fiction has been broadcast on NPR, performed on stage in Los Angeles, and published by Tin House, McSweeney’s, VICE, Longform, Redivider, D Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, Green Mountains Review, Short Fiction, FiveChapters, The Lifted Brow, Hobart, Puerto del Sol, The Los Angeles Review, The Masters Review, Booth, Faultline, FLAUNT Magazine, Malibu Magazine, Day One, PANK, Fiction Southeast, Surreal South '13, and selected by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2015. Blake’s collection of short tales, Families Among Us, an Indie Bestseller, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2014. He is working on his first novel. Blake has been awarded fellowships to attend the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and the Vermont Studio Center and a generous grant from Americans for the Arts Foundation. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at SMU and has also taught creative writing at UT-Dallas and UC-Irvine. Follow him on Twitter @BlakeKimzey, find him online at blakekimzey.com, contact him at blake@writingworkshopsdallas.com, or use the Contact link above.

Blake Kimzey’s "Breeders" has this great narrator. He’s an idiot, but he’s a charming idiot. -Literary Minded

Very engaging in pretty absurd ways...Kimzey is a new voice to me and when I read ['Donald Mason'] I knew he was a great talent. -Steven Seighman via Luna Park

Very funny (and surprisingly touching). -Shya Scanlon, author of The Guild of St. Cooper

"Little Man" was a beautifully written piece and has stayed with me vividly ever since reading it." -Lisa GlassKimzey makes insecurity, alcohol, and assholeish-ness funny. I really didn't like this guy but he made for a great read. -Sara Habein, Glorified Love Letters

Words on my Short Tales:

Each of the stories in Blake Kimzey’s astonishing chapbook Families Among Us are intricate, beautifully written universes unto themselves. These stories blur the lines between what is real and what is possible yet they are also intimate and familiar because they are stories about people and connection and the very human desire to be a part of something greater than ourselves. —Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State and Bad Feminist

These stories are like tiny portholes into worlds teeming with rich, surprising life. Blake Kimzey is a master miniaturist. —Ramona Ausubel, author of No One is Here Except All of Us and A Guide to Being Born

Blake Kimzey has given us all the pleasures our imagination can bear, six stories to savor slowly, to break our hearts and then mend them. I wanted more of these good things. —Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk and In the Devil's Territory

In Families Among Us, Blake Kimzey’s inventive prose summons six weird worlds of the imagination—but more than anything else, these imagined worlds conjure not some other space but the forgotten weirdness of the world we know, revealed here in all its wondrous everyday magic. —Matt Bell, author of Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

Following the likes of Orson Welles and his radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, Rod Serling and the television series The Twilight Zone, and John Carpenter and his film The Thing, Blake Kimzey and his chapbook collection of short stories Families Among Us delve deep into different, yet equally mysterious phenomena. Kimzey’s collection proposes that we need look no further than our own homes and communities for the source of the curious and the bizarre, and it is through these otherworldly, yet earthly, creations that we discover that which binds us all. -Colorado Review, Center for Literary Publishing

I’m happy to say, in all cases, that Families Among Us takes my defenses apart. Without ever resorting to one-to-one symbolic resonances, or hyperbolic strangeness, these stories strike a balance that leaves me feeling both recognized, and impossibly far from home. I also end up wondering how Kimzey walks this line so well. Even as the book remains, start to finish, at a pleasingly odd level of partial-resolution, engaging me with unnamed characters and situations that feel near to allegorical, for me it delivers this simple truth: though the forest is always possible, the town is, and always will be, what we have. -Green Mountains Review

When a writer tells vibrant stories that bleed into the margins, and when a sharp design meets fitting, fascinating artwork, the result is too great to ignore. In other words, the result is Families Among Us. An entire universe lives within these forty pages, spun into existence with the sincere cadence of an ancient origin story. For readers, this chapbook is a welcome pause from realism, a chance to give in to and live briefly in the fantastical. -PANK

"The Boy and The Bear" achieves what all great flash fiction aims to achieve in that readers live in a fully imagined world, even if for only a short time. This story is both magical and sad, and we were immediately drawn to the quality of the writing and the story’s fable-like quality. Simply put, you won’t forget this one. -The Masters Review

Lovely and Majestic. Kimzey has fashioned six allegories about the inevitability of change, people trying to love what is different from themselves, and the hardship and heartbreak that comes with being part of a family. -The Small Press Book Review

Families Among Us is a daring book. As with Kafka’s work, after living in these stories for a couple days, they get even stranger, and new layers emerge. -Fiction Southeast

Captivating...[Families Among Us] would go on to win the Black River Chapbook Competition, and rightly so; it’s frickin’ great. -Structo (Oxford, England)